The kick off meeting of the FunFiCO RISE project took place on December 20th at Aveiro University. This is a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange partnership between Aveiro University (coordinator), Sheffield University (UK), UFPa (Brazil), UNAM (Mexico) and Valencia University (Spain).
Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro visited Kindai University in Osaka, Japan, hosted by Prof. Akihiro Ishibashi, within a Marie Curie RISE partnership that includes both Aveiro U. and Kindai U. (StronGrHEP project). The photo shows a delightful dinner with collegues from Osaka City University, including Hideki Hishihara, Ken-ichi Nakao and Hirotaka Yoshino.
Gr@v members P. Cunha and C. Herdeiro were amongst the participants of the 27th workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation in Japan (JGRG 27). Herdeiro was one of the invited speakers.
Five of the ground-breaking gravitational wave detections by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration have been interpreted as black hole collisions forming a more massive black hole. It is hard to demonstrate conclusively that these objects are indeed black holes, and there is a lively debate on the intriguing possibility that other, more exotic alternatives could explain the observations. In an article published in Physical Review Letters, Gr@v members P. Cunha and C.
The Higgs vacuum is a metastable state with lifetime longer than the age of the universe, but the vacuum can be destabilised by microscopic black hole seeds. The nucleation process is a nice example of black hole thermodynamics.
Alexandre Pombo successfully finished his Physics M.Sc. at Aveiro University, on October 10th 2017, by defending a thesis with title "Q-balls spectroscopy and construction of boson stars". This thesis was supervised by Gr@v researchers and examined by Prof. Yves Brihaye, from the University of Mons, Belgium. Well done Alexandre!
Helgi Rúnarsson successfully defended his PhD thesis "Kerr black holes with scalar and Proca hair". The exam took place at the University of Aveir, on October 9th 2017. The thesis was supervised by Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu and former member J. C. Degollado, now at UNAM (Mexico). Congratulations Helgi!
Full Name: Alexandre M. Pombo
Position: PostDoc at CEICO
Degree: PhD in Physics
Email: pomboalexandremira@ua.pt
ORCID: 0000-0002-5815-2758
Gr@v member António P. Morais gave a talk at Escola Secundária José Régio in Vila do Conde with title "Do Infinitamente Grande ao Infinitamente Pequeno - uma jornada pelas interações fundamentais na natureza". António was an invited speaker to participate in a sequence of seminars entitled "A Biblioteca convida...", and presented to 11th and 12th grade Science and Technology students the four fundamental interactions in nature and how have they shaped our Universe.